Nero AG, a company with one of the most fitting names ever (can you imagine a company called Hitler or Stalin 2000 years from now?), has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the MPEG-LA. The German technology company claims the licensing body has abused its monopoly power, and that is has not honoured agreements made with the US Department of Justice. There's some juicy stuff in here.

Both of them PAY MPEG-LA royalties because they are afraid of getting sued! It would be in Apple's and Microsoft's best interests if there were no MPEG-LA extorting money from them. Apple chose to support H.264 for basically two reasons, 1: they pay MPEG-LA royalties, so they won't get sued, if they used some other codec, they could potentially get sued by MPEG-LA, basically. And 2: they have a really good decoder for H.264, it would take a lot of time and money to implement decoders as good for other codecs.

Both of them PAY MPEG-LA royalties because they are afraid of getting sued!

No, both Microsoft and Apple are members of the MPEG LA gang (along with Sony, Dolby, and a few others). They collect royalties from other companies using H.264 (and try to sue competing formats). That is why Apple and Microsoft refused to implement Theora decoding in their browsers (Safari and MSIE). They already pay MPEG LA to be allowed to use H.264, so there wasn't even any risk of being sued. They refused to support the open format because they get royalties from the proprietary one, and neither of them knows how to compete on a level playing field.

Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera, on the other hand, are not members of MPEG LA (and only the first two pay the H.264 "protection money").

I've been buying a Nerolinux license since their first release. Originally motivated by wanting to support company's investing in Linux ports I continually buy it because they've done a great job with the software. While the open source Brasero and K3b work ok Nerolinux is very good. It's not bloated with crap like their Windows port and it's only $20.

I very highly recommend people supporting them not only for the principle but it also being an excellent product.